Monthly Archives: December 2016

Electricity Costs bring down Delhi Community Hall

It is claimed wind projects bring many economic benefits in a green economy to society but in reality they are killing the economic viability for many community groups. Expensive renewable energy contracts are a driving force pointed at as responsible for escalating the costs of electricity beyond sustainability. Green ideology tearing apart the binding fabric of our communities one after another and another.

Club gives tip of the hat to Premier Wynne

There will be no more banquets, wedding receptions, concerts, trade shows or public meetings at the Delhi Belgian Hall for the foreseeable future.

However, the Shields & Friends Lounge in the lower level of the sprawling complex will continue receiving patrons and serving drinks into 2017.

That according to the bar’s manager Kim Starling. Starling was hired in October soon after the Belgian Club announced it was pondering its future in the face of punishing utility bills and declining rentals.

In late October, the club executive announced that its financial problems were insurmountable and that the historic property would be sold.

They weren’t bluffing. Today, a sign is posted out front advertising the 30,000-square-foot building for sale. The asking price, according to the realtor’s website, is $899,000.

There is also a second sign out front expressing the club’s bitterness over skyrocketing electricity prices and what that has done to the hall’s viability as a community centre.

The sign says: “Hydro One 2016: $49,559. You Wynne, We Lose.”

Some of the hall’s monthly hydro bills this year were as high as $5,700. Even with 1,200 members, the club concluded it can’t go on carrying a burden like this.

The timing of the hydro whammy is especially unfortunate. The hall’s heating-ventilation-air conditioning system needs to be replaced. The building’s electrical system also needs updating.

If the club finds a buyer, Starling hopes the hall can continue forward in its current format.

“That would be nice,” she said Friday. “That’s how I’d like it to be. I’d hate to see the building go.”

In its promotional literature, realtor CBRE Ltd. of London says the 1.78-acre package has a lot of potential uses.

CBRE notes that 360 James Street has a service commercial zoning. In Norfolk County, this allows for a wide range of commercial applications.

The property, CBRE adds, comes with a “large lot with plenty of excess land for parking or further development.”

The Belgian Hall was founded in 1948 as a meeting place for the wave of Belgian families that settled in this part of southern Ontario after the Second World War. The hall earned a reputation in southern Ontario in the 1970s as a premier showcase for up-and-coming rock bands.

Acts that performed at the Belgian Hall include Ronnie Hawkins, Rush, Lighthouse, The Stampeders, April Wine, Max Webster, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

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Big oil and its relationship to wind power is not new for opponents of wind turbine projects. Community groups opposing harmful impacts of wind power will enviably face inaccurate accusations they are puppets funded by big oil masters. Careful examination of parent companies of wind facilities in Ontario find the limited partnerships are often cleaved from entities using fossil fuel power generation as its principle source for profit making. Electricity made in these companies power plants is done mainly by using fossil fuels (such as natural gas). It has been claimed that the big oil incorporations not only follow the lure of subsidies but they also helped to create the current political stage and renewable energy policies. This in turn fuels the spin of green energy money markets. Following the money it is clear making money remains the primary goal. Managing the marketing of big oil’s image held by consumers makes how electricity is generated just an after thought.

“It remains unclear if offshore wind can be a steady moneymaker without government support, which besides tax credits and minimum rates can include guaranteed access to power grids.”

The Netherlands wants to build the world’s largest offshore wind project, and an unlikely company is helping: Royal Dutch Shell.

The oil-and-gas giant is facing shareholder pressure to develop its renewable business. Add in falling construction costs for such projects, and Shell has decided to join a handful of other oil companies aiming to leverage their experience drilling under punishing conditions at sea.

Norway’s Statoil is already building its third offshore wind farm, in the Baltic Sea, and is developing the world’s first floating wind farm off the east coast of Scotland. Denmark’s state-owned Dong Energy – once a fossil-fuel champion – is now the biggest player in the offshore wind market.

A Shell-led consortium won a bid this month to build and operate a portion of the Netherlands’ giant Borssele wind project in the North Sea. Once complete, the Shell-built section will generate enough power for roughly a million homes at a price of €54.5 ($A79.20) per megawatt hour – a customer rate approaching that of cheaper power sources like coal or gas.

Offshore wind’s competitiveness is highly subject to local power prices and government measures, including tax credits, subsidies and rate guarantees. Nonetheless, in European markets, the wind industry had thought near parity was years away.

“Right now the offshore wind project is competitive with any power source,” said Dorine Bosman, Shell’s manager developing its wind business.

Offshore windpower projects involve driving steel foundations into the sea floor for towers that support building-size turbines with propellers wider than the wingspan of an Airbus A380. Though historically more expensive to build than onshore wind farms, offshore projects can take advantage of less restricted space and stronger, more consistent winds.

The technological arms race to build these complex projects economically is so heated that many companies, including Shell, won’t disclose how much they are investing, treating their commitments like a trade secret.

Fossil-fuel companies’ push into wind reflects their growing sensitivity to global efforts to limit climate change and how that will affect consumer demand for their main offering: oil and gas.

France’s Total wants 20 per cent of its portfolio to consist of low-carbon businesses within the next 20 years. Shell established a new division this year focused on investing in sources such as wind, solar and biofuels. Statoil has a $US200 million fund for projects such as wind technology and batteries.

Investments by big European oil companies in wind and other renewable energy sources remain small – around 2 per cent of their overall capital-spending budgets, according to McKinsey. The industry is cautious about betting big on alternatives after getting burned in the past.

It remains unclear if offshore wind can be a steady moneymaker without government support, which besides tax credits and minimum rates can include guaranteed access to power grids.

“It should be the ambition of everybody to not have subsidies,” Ms Bosman of Shell said.

Lower costs – brought on by technological improvements, economies of scale and low interest rates – are helping move the sector in that direction. Earlier this year the windpower industry was targeting a price of €100 per megawatt hour by 2020; subsequently three auctions of project rights this year in the Netherlands and Denmark settled on rates below that level.

Shell previously pulled back from involvement in offshore wind that proved unprofitable and says it will be primarily an oil-and-gas supplier for decades to come. But the improving economics of wind power have prompted the company to dip its toe back in the water, joining others in crowding the heavily subsidised specialists that once dominated the sector.

Dong Energy has sold off a large portion of its fossil-fuels business, including five Norwegian oil and gas fields, and now has 29 per cent of the world’s built offshore wind capacity, according to spokesman Tom Lehn-Christiansen. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. took an ownership stake in Dong Energy in 2014, and the company went public in June.

Statoil has invested $US2.1 billion since 2010, or about 20 per cent of a single year’s capital budget, in offshore wind parks. After two years of whipsawing oil prices, offshore wind’s relatively stable prices are dreamlike for oil executives, said Irene Rummelhoff, Statoil’s executive vice president for renewables.

Even Exxon Mobil, which hasn’t put the same emphasis on renewables, has dabbled with the technology, with the idea of using floating wind turbines to help power its offshore oil and gas platforms.

Although solar power is expected to be the fastest-growing renewable energy source over the next five years, the International Energy Agency forecasts offshore wind capacity will triple by 2021. While that will remain below 1 per cent of global capacity, the growth prospects are particularly attractive in regions such as Northern Europe where sunlight is in short supply for half the year.

Japan, China, India and Taiwan are all poised to place bets on offshore wind now that its cost is coming down, according to the industry group Global Wind Energy Council.

In the US, President-elect Donald Trump has been sceptical of wind power, warning of its cost, unsightliness and risks to wildlife. However, Texas was a forerunner of onshore wind energy in the US under the watch of former governor Rick Perry, Mr Trump’s pick to lead the Energy Department.

Offshore wind in the US got a boost this month when the country’s first park went online off the coast of Block Island, Rhode Island. Days later, Statoil won a bid for a potential project in the Atlantic Ocean south of Long Island – its first offshore wind lease in the US.

Jeffrey Grybowski, CEO of Deepwater Wind, which developed the Block Island project, said the oil companies will face a tougher landscape in the US compared with Europe because of bureaucratic hurdles and fewer incentives.

Developing and presenting a unique and innovative acoustic installation template to offer a spatial, frequency and calibrated reproduction of a wind turbine noise to the public..Dominique Bollinger, Xavier Falourd, Lukas Rohr.

Comparison of the IOA method and Japanese F-S method for quantitative assessment of amplitude modulation of wind turbine noise – A study based on the field measurement results in Japan.Akinori Fukushima, Hideki Tachibana.

A REVIEW OF RESEARCH INTO THE AMPLITUDE MODULATED COMPONENT OF WIND TURBINE NOISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF A CONTROL METHOD FOR IMPLEMENTATION IN THE UK.RICHARD PERKINS, Michael Lotinga, Bernard Berry, Colin Grimwood, Stephen Stansfeld.

Experience of reviewing wind farm noise assessments for Scottish local authorities and the implementation of the IOA Good Practice Guide to the Application of ETSU-R-97 for the Assessment and Rating of Wind Turbine Noise.Steve Summers, Graham Parry.

An Update on the Prediction, Assessment and Compliance of Wind Farm Noise in Australia.Peter Teague.

A case study of how to involve impacted neighbors in measuring and characterizing windfarm noise.Sveinulf Vagene.

D’Amato: Hydro woes will finish Liberals

“Do you like my Christmas lights?” asks the latest joke circulating on social media.

The sentence is written in white on an imposing inky-black background. It’s puzzling for a moment as you stop to ask yourself where the lights are.

But then you get it. At the bottom of the black square is the punchline: “Oh sorry, I live in Ontario and can’t afford to turn them on!”

What is it with fuel and the Liberals, anyway? The political career of former Premier Dalton McGuinty was dashed by his party’s decision five years ago to cancel planned natural-gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga, costing Ontarians more than a billion dollars.

Today, high electricity prices are doing the same thing to the political career of Premier Kathleen Wynne. Out-of-control prices have put a chokehold on small businesses, the engines of job creation. Moreover, some families are forced to use dangerous portable heaters because they don’t have access to their electricity. It’s a crisis.

Politicians in power devote a lot of time and energy toward pretending that nothing is wrong, when it really is. But when you watch televised newscast clips of Wynne (whose approval rating is now at the lowest of any premier in Canada, at 16 per cent), you can see how rattled she seems to be.

While it’s touching that she takes responsibility, the politicians don’t quite seem to understand the significance of what’s happening. In one videotaped interview I saw, Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault agreed it must be “disconcerting” to have the power cut off because you can’t pay.

Not exactly, minister. “Disconcerting” is when someone else beats you to those prized theatre seats in front row mezzanine. Not being able to pay your hydro bill is a whole different thing. It’s crushingly stressful. It’s soul-destroying.

The opposition gets it. Both the Conservatives and New Democrats regularly pound the Liberals on this topic in the Ontario Legislature. New Democratic Party leader Andrea Horwath was in Cambridge on Tuesday to meet with a woman who struggles to pay hydro bills.

Think about why costs are soaring and you encounter the fatal flaw of the 13-year-old Liberal government. It meant well. But there’s a big difference between having a grand visionary outlook and actually being able to manage something.

Give McGuinty credit for dreaming up the idea that we could put people back to workandhelp save the environment. He thought it would create jobs for Ontario to produce wind turbines and solar panels. As an incentive, the government offered lots of money to buy the power back. That’s part of what put prices up so high, so quickly.

There’s more. The difference between low market prices and the higher prices promised to these new producers of wind and sun energy is called the “global adjustment charge.” Between 2006 and 2015, we paid an unnecessary $50 billion subsidizing this vision, Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk says.

That subsidy accounts for 70 per cent of consumers’ electricity rates in 2013. But the difference between the market price — what we would be paying if the Liberals had left well enough alone — and the global adjusted rate isn’t clear on our bills. Lysyk says it should be. The government, unsurprisingly, wants to leave it murky. Because obfuscation is all they’ve got left.

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One of the skills acquired in fighting wind turbines is how to obtain and extract information held by the Ontario government using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. Information that should be freely accessible without obstruction but is not. Knowledge is power and who controls the data controls the known story.

Details of wind projects, bird and bat kills by wind turbines, negative impacts to environment, and even how many people have filed complaints about adverse health effects are within the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change’s jurisdiction. Information and data held, protected and only released reluctantly in bits and pieces with persistent repeated requests. The process is convoluted, bureaucratic and most importantly time consuming. The time involved enables strict time lines applied in appeal hearings at the Environmental Tribunal Review. The government has an expected service response time of 30 days and if not met the delay must be given with a justified explanation. That is not what has happened.

“…auditors concluded dates “were systematically adjusted by staff” in the FOI office to show completion of requests within the 30-day requirement period.”

A recent audit shows the MOECC failed in its duties and has been changing the dates of FOI requests. The government has lied by falsifying the dates. MOECC has now been caught begging the question what else has also been falsified?

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The flames of political fires are blowing hot shifting winds of change creating a scorching backdraft for Ontario’s renewable energy program. The Minister of Energy’s latest directive spells out the end of FIT application procurement (feed -in -tariff). FIT 6 is to be pronounced dead as of the end of December.

“The final FIT application period will be held in 2016. The IESO shall cease accepting applications under the FIT program by December 31, 2016 and any unallocated procurement target at the end of that procurement process will remain unallocated”

A tiny step heading in the right direction. It is never too late to do the right thing and is on the right path of cancelling wind contracts.

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Regarding the article Raptor kills exceeded by wind project (Dec. 16), so there are specific numbers of deaths of birds, bats and raptors that constitute “acceptable” losses? Collateral damage? Just a cost of doing business in pursuit of green energy? Cripes!

Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change? What a sick, oxymoronic joke that is. Are these flying creatures not part of the environment, and therefore worthy of protection? Almost everything this careless government does now shocks and saddens me, but none of it surprises me because I have come to expect the worst of people presently in positions of authority.

OEB actions paternalistic

Last month, the Ontario Energy Board decided to protect rate payers from knowing how much the Liberal government’s cap-and-trade policy would add to their monthly gas bills.

Now the OEB has decided to relieve us of the burden of knowing how much the government’s electricity policies are affecting our monthly hydro bill.

The OEB, it seems, is worried that too much information may confuse the average Ontario taxpayer. At least that’s how they responded to Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s request that hydro bills be changed to increase “the awareness and transparency” of the impact of the so-called “global adjustment charge.”

The global adjustment is an extra charge that is levied to cover the gap between the guaranteed prices the Liberal government promised electricity generators in 20-year contracts and the actual market rates.

Lysyk has estimated that global adjustment accounted for 70 per cent of consumer electricity rates in 2013. If so, that’s something that should be plainly disclosed on every hydro bill.

For the OEB to contend that further transparency would only confuse ratepayers is highly paternalistic, if not down right arrogant.

Give us the information. If we get confused, we can call and ask for clarification.

Liberal Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault has again refused to intervene on behalf of the auditor general or the taxpayer on the basis that the OEB is an independent quasi-judicial regulatory body.

That’s very convenient. Thibeault may not have the power to order the OEB to change their ways … but perhaps he can at least ask. He has the power to do that.

As it is, it’s getting harder for the public to take the claim of OEB independence seriously.

Who could possibly benefit from burying the cost of the Liberal’s questionable energy policies … other than the Liberal government?

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Carmen Krogh presenting her research at a Primary Health Care provider conference

Independent researchers Carmen Krogh and Dr McMurtry provide a detailed response in the December 2016 edition of Noise & Health publication to Dr McCunney’s et al critical commentary of the peer reviewed and published paper- Diagnosticcriteria for adversehealtheffects in the environs of windturbines.

“The content of the article by McCunney et al. suggests that its authors may not have understood the procedure presented for diagnosing patients suffering from ‘annoyance’ and the ‘well-known stress effects of exposure to noise’. While this response does not address all the weaknesses contained in the analysis by McCunney et al., it is our hope it will help clarify understanding of this diagnostic tool. We invite readers to explore the work of McMurtry and Krogh, and as always we welcome constructive commentary.”